The Ultimate in Playing It Safe, the Battle for the Ancestral Hall

But Gao Linzhi didn't offer any warning, just like before.

He did nothing before, and he's doing the same thing now.

This is what it means to be dishonest; this is what it means to be dishonest.

He will never easily show his face unless it affects him personally.

In this world rife with eccentricities, such kindness is a luxury.

He's playing an online game, not a single-player game, so there's no save/start function.

Despite having puppets, substitutes, and unlimited resurrections, he still felt insecure.

And at this time...

As the airship plunged headlong into the sea, someone finally realized something was wrong.

At that moment, lightning appeared in the clouds.

In their perception, bolts of lightning were striking upwards from below.

That's not right.

Lightning usually strikes the ground from high altitudes, so how could it possibly strike from the ground to high altitudes?

There's only one explanation: their sense of direction is completely reversed.

"No, we're mistaken!"

"The airship is flying downwards!"

"Lightning strikes from high in the sky, but we perceive it as coming from the sea—that's proof!"

"Stop immediately!"

The helmsman was extremely tense for a moment.

And at this time...

Ouyang Jing and the Old Daoist Tiansheng, among others, also noticed something was wrong.

They activated many of the airship's runes in time.

Some things accelerate, and some things decelerate; otherwise, it would be ridiculous if they couldn't stop.

The slowing runes were rapidly depleting the airship's energy reserves.

Finally, just as it approached the sea surface, the airship came to a difficult stop.

Gao Linzhi shook his head.

If it were a regular plane, it would have crashed by now.

These runes represent extraordinary power.

It completely reversed the rules of reality.

Let the fall finally come to an end.

However, the disaster did not end there.

Because of the continuous attacks of wind, thunder, and lightning from the sky.

Not only that.

A gigantic creature suddenly appeared from the sea!

A gigantic mouth, and inside that mouth was like a bottomless abyss.

Above the mouth are two huge red lanterns that look like human eyes.

The gigantic maw lunged straight at the airship!

"Quick, quick, change direction and fly upwards!"

But the helmsman was in a very bad mood at that moment.

He clearly felt that the top was the bottom, and the bottom was the top.

But he had no choice but to defy his own instincts and choose the right path.

This kind of misperception is very distressing.

Because it felt like walking into a trap.

In his perception, he was piloting a flying boat downwards to commit suicide.

The airship was getting closer and closer to the giant mouth.

In reality, the airship quickly broke free of the giant mouth and flew rapidly upwards.

That's all.

The time has come to test the helmsman.

He had to overcome his impulses time and time again, and each time he had to choose the wrong way to fly.

"It seems the technology on this airship isn't very good; it doesn't even have an instrument flight mode," Gao Linzhi thought to himself.

Currently, we can only rely on human perception to control it.

This is clearly unreliable.

Behind them, the tornado was getting closer and closer.

The advantage is that it attracts the clouds and tears them apart.

The helmsman finally had a clear view.

He no longer needs to overcome his instinctive impulses.

Just then, someone suddenly reported to the captain's cabin:

"Something's wrong! The ship sustained damage during the emergency braking just now."

"If we don't repair it urgently, I'm afraid it won't last long."

After listening to the report, Ouyang Jing reported to the elderly man, "Sir, we can't fly to Wolf Snake Island anymore. We must stop on a nearby island to temporarily avoid the tornado, repair the ship, and then continue our journey."

"Are there any inhabited islands nearby?" the elderly man asked weakly.

"Look at the nautical chart, there's another one called Mangxiao Island. It has only one village with a population of just over 400. If a storm comes, only 40 of them will survive," Ouyang Jing said, taking the nautical chart and examining it carefully. "That means their ancestral hall can only hold 40 people."

"That's enough!"

"But we have over 200 people on our ship," the Old Daoist Tiansheng said at this moment.

"Apart from the people of the Imperial Observatory, are the others even human?" Ouyang Jing said disdainfully.

"But Mangxiao Island is directly under the jurisdiction of the Sima family. If we go there and cripple that village, they won't let it go easily," the Old Daoist Tiansheng said with difficulty. "After all, managing an inhabited island is very difficult."

"Damn it! These powerful families rely on the imperial court, yet they refuse to share its burdens!" the old man said angrily. "Let's go to their island!"

"Stay for a while, then leave. They won't have anything to say then!"

"Yes, they've been so ruthless in exploiting the people; it's time they did something for the court!" Ouyang Jing said coldly.

She didn't actually care about the Sky Wolf Dynasty at all; what she longed for was the real world of the players.

Therefore, she didn't care about the dynasty or its people; everything was just a tool in her eyes.

The same applies to these people in front of us.

Gao Linzhi naturally had no fondness for powerful and influential families.

If you learn about the late stages of feudal dynasties in history, you'll understand.

Powerful clans typically monopolize the local bureaucratic class.

When collecting taxes, the imperial court stipulated that only three li of silver should be collected per mu of land, but these guys could collect three li or even more.

They usually charge 10 times or more.

They'd be lucky to give even 10% to the imperial court.

They often only give half a percent.

The tax revenue that the imperial court could obtain was very small.

Just like in the TV series "Great Ming 1566", the salt tax was initially ten million taels, but it eventually became one million taels. It was only when the Yan family collected the tax that the local government was willing to pay three million taels.

This has led to a situation where the imperial court raises taxes when it is short of money, but as a result, only a small amount of money can be collected.

The common people, however, have to bear dozens of times the burden.

So the people rose up in rebellion.

After the rebellion, the imperial court needed to increase taxes to exert pressure, and then it would increase taxes even more.

As a result, these tax increases forced even those places that hadn't previously rebelled to revolt.

Gao Linzhi guessed that the Sima family probably wanted to rebel.

The court officials also discerned the other party's intentions.

The Sky Wolf Dynasty was beset by both internal and external troubles.

Within lies a strange and powerful family; without, there are players.

Attacked from both sides, it's no wonder it can't survive long.

Soon, the airship changed direction and headed towards a small island.

But a storm was brewing behind the scenes.

In less than half an hour, the airship finally arrived at the small island.

At this moment, in the middle of the island, there was a village.

The villagers were gathered in the small ancestral hall.

The ancestral hall is not large, only about the size of two rooms.

However, it was crowded with a full four hundred people.

It seems the village chief and elders lack sufficient authority to decide in advance who should live and who should die.

Then we can only come in and leave the rest to fate.

They were clearly aware that the storm was approaching.

That's normal, because the tornado was so obvious.

It stretches to the sky and connects to the sea, and can be seen from afar.

Everyone knows its power; waterspouts are its nickname.

At that moment, the airship landed.

"Get out of here, all of you!"

"The imperial court has occupied this place!"

Several fierce-looking crew members, wielding knives, drove the people out of the ancestral hall.

Which is worse, natural disasters or man-made disasters?

Natural disasters kill less than one percent of those caused by human error.

The ancestral hall used to be able to protect one-tenth of the people, with at least 40 surviving. Now, not a single person can survive.

They knelt on the ground and begged, but the vicious crew members ignored them completely.

Instead, they kicked and punched the person to drive them away.

They didn't kill them outright—not because they were kind.

Instead, if someone commits murder, then the number of asylum slots, which are allocated to one-tenth, will be reduced.

If everyone is killed, the ancestral hall will be ruined.

Therefore, it's not that they are benevolent, but rather that they are bound by constraints.

Gao Linzhi kept these two words in mind: constraint.

Soon, forty people disembarked from the airship.

Ouyang Jing, an elderly man, Old Daoist Tiansheng, and he also had two young boys.

To Gao Linzhi's surprise, he, a C-class material, was among them.

In contrast, some minor leaders were not even qualified to enter the ancestral hall.

These people watched the storm from inside the ancestral hall, while the others stood outside, shivering.

Sure enough, a storm soon struck.

"Ah!"

The first unlucky person appeared.

"Damn it, since we're going to die anyway, we might as well go and take this place back!"

A brave villager stepped forward.

The abandoned crew members also stepped forward.

Ironically, those abandoned crew members were precisely the ones who worked hardest to drive away the villagers.

Now that they've finished their work, they're being sent to their deaths!

How can this be tolerated?

They're going to rebel!

So these people hit it off immediately.

The villagers initially disliked them, but upon learning that the culprit was still inside the ancestral hall, they agreed to join forces with them.

For those doomed dynasties, the best approach was not to suppress the rebels, but to appease them.

Just like now, Gao Linzhi believes that Ouyang Jing and the others should take a more conciliatory approach.

For example, simple hypnosis techniques.

This led the villagers to believe that the disaster was over.

But they were too lazy to do that, and simply and brutally drove everyone away, preferring to suppress them rather than give them any hope.

But they didn't realize that appeasement is always cheaper than suppression.

If they had chosen to appease the villagers, the subsequent unrest would not have occurred.

The reason is simple: the villagers who can be appeased are the most powerful in the village.

But now, Ouyang Jing and her group have driven them all away without any regard for the consequences.

This deprived them of the opportunity to leverage the local resources of the villagers.

Of course, they weren't worried about not having enough strength.

However, they forgot one thing: the biggest problem for any last dynasty is a lack of money.

With money, anything is possible; you can even buy this land.

The biggest problem, however, was that the imperial court failed to appease the rebels.

That's because the imperial court was short of money and could only appease the situation temporarily.

Especially the fall of each dynasty.

Once the wheels of destruction are set in motion, there is no stopping them.

Feudal dynasties were never able to solve their internal problems.

They can only have a final celebration, receive one or two "ZTE" ratings, and then inevitably collapse.

Now, the island, battered by the storm, has become a small, isolated area.

The villagers and the decommissioned crew rallied together, determined to launch an attack before the tornado hit the land!

"Kill them!"

"These damned officials never let us have enough to eat, and they kill off large numbers of people at the drop of a hat to force peace into the land!"

"We must eliminate these bastards for the sake of our descendants!"

How ironic.

Gao Linzhi was speechless.

This workforce may be the most valuable human resource; where there is labor, there is money.

This is the truly normal way of understanding things.

Soon, the villagers rushed towards the ancestral hall.

Now, for the sake of a strange Eye of the Storm, even the elderly man, Old Daoist Tiansheng, Ouyang Jing, has decided to kill these rebels.

Of course, we can't kill them all; we can only kill one or two ringleaders to crush their will to resist.

At the entrance of the ancestral hall stood two high-ranking crew members.

But in Gao Linzhi's eyes, the opponent was only level 25.

Soon, just as the villagers, brandishing various weapons, rushed to the entrance of the ancestral hall, Ouyang Jing looked at an assistant beside her.

The assistant then took out a talisman, which instantly transformed into dozens of streams of icy water.

It was originally just meant to scare them.

The villagers soon discovered that the ice water was harmless, except for being very cold.

They took out wooden planks to block the icy water.

Clearly, these extraordinary powers are not strong enough to directly intimidate ordinary villagers.

The assistant did not cast the talismans one after another.

Instead, he started slacking off, in order to conserve the Mysterious Energy within his body.

He also made the most of his surroundings.

He then fired several locust stones.

Soon Ouyang Jing summoned two more guards to block the only entrance to the ancestral hall.

One of the guards drew his knife and charged into the crowd, hacking and slashing on the spot, though it was really just to intimidate them.

Of course, he always remembered the restrictions imposed by the ancestral hall.

One-tenth of the total population.

Therefore, they did not directly engage in killing.

This is common knowledge among the indigenous people living in the Skyfall World, without needing to be reminded by others.

And at this time...

The villagers who had attacked suddenly seemed to have changed in some way.

At this moment, the tornado actually stopped; it didn't end, but rather it was watching the competition for places in the ancestral hall.

For some reason, the villagers suddenly seemed to feel no pain and pounced on him.

They grabbed onto the leg of a guard, who then used the back of his knife to beat them.

Many people had their hands tightly clung to each other.

Then more people rushed up as well.

They used bricks, shovels, or brooms to shout at the people on the airships:

"We must live too!"

"Let us in immediately!"

And so, the two sides started fighting.

Inside the ancestral hall, chaos reigned.

Some people started to take drastic measures.

"We can't kill them. If we do, they'll only resort to even more ruthless methods!"

"Arrest them and throw them out of the ancestral hall!" another man who looked like the village chief said.

However, those who listen are always in the minority.

And so, the last two guards met a tragic end amidst the crowd attacking the ancestral hall.

Gao Linzhi remained unmoved by this.

He watched silently as the crowd began to rush in.

Soon, almost no one could get in because the ancestral hall was packed with people.